Feb

3

The Bangkok tourist industry is thriving, tenfold from when I was there on a darker day. Cambodia is emerging, the people are gentle, prices are low and everyone is unwordly. Entrepreneurs have a chance to jump in at the ground level. Laos is the S.E. Asia refugee capital, it's interesting & crass, where there are only the Hmong– tough, honest little bastards who helped Joe (as they called me) in the Vietnam War.

The land is spectacular, a jungle covered rocky mountains. Vietnam is odd to me, the people are capable to switch in a blink from totally inner to outer directed, or back. One second I was dealing w/ a crowd of Rambos & the next an anthill. It was the most difficult country to travel in– I could have had a chicken and then a boy saved or die in my arms in the same day from a car accident, yet tradition has it that I could have been locked away for murder. So I didn't cross that road, and don't invest there.

I visited Art Tyde in the Philippines who thrives surrounded by beautiful, smart women w/ good jobs traveling the world re: computers. He suggests Manila for ex-pats, however it's as smoggy as L.A. stacked on Tijuana. Brunei is a model train set owned by some rich kid, and is nearly abandoned of citizens. A fish jumped out of a bucket at a market onto my foot, the most exciting thing except I was the sole passenger on a 2 hour bus across the nation to leave on a ferry.

Borneo is the utopia authors have tried to describe for centuries. Seekers come for an ideally functioning island society… til the sun goes down. The Jekylls turn Hydes as Muslim loudspeakers dot every few km along the streets, rivers and paths to make the chants inescapable, males chain smoke to a frenzy and practice polygamy, and the kids watch cartoons on tv.

Sulwesi Island, touched by Danish architecture & the Chinese who believed death is the most important part of the life cycle, is whacked out, except for the massages. I won't invest another day and I'll take tomorrow's 6am $100 flight to Sumatra.